Eco-innovation portfolio

Each of the Basque Ecodesign Center personalised watch reports is summarised in what is known in the “Eco- innovation portfolio”. By analysing the internal strengths and weaknesses of each company as regards the environment and its relative positioning in terms of its direct competitors and the leading sectoral leaders,  the report sets out a whole series of technical alerts identi?ed through the watch system. They are courses of action being implemented as part of the company’s activity, research projects, new legislative and regulatory development, public positioning of NGOs and other key stakeholders, new market instruments and their  practical application in the industrial sector or market trends.

The step is to identify the specific proposed courses of action that the company can carry out and which de?ne a possible Eco-innovation portfolio.

The “Innovation Ambition Matrix”, developed using a classic diagram produced by H. Igor Anso?, the mathematician, to help companies to allocate funds among growth initiatives, was used to structure these proposals and to help the company to manage strategic innovation. The Anso? matrix clari?es the idea that tactics must vary according to whether a company launches a new product, enters a new market, or both things.

The new version of the matrix replaces the Anso?'s market and product binary options (the old and the new) for a range of values. It is thus recognised that innovation in the range o?ered by a company (on axis x) and innovation in the markets of its customers (on axis y) are a question of degree.

Three levels of distance are therefore superimposed from the company to the reality. This means three possible levels of Eco-innovation for the company, beginning from left to right:

• Nuclear innovation. It covers those main Eco-innovation initiatives, aimed at incremental changes in the existing products by consolidating and rea?rming the current customers and markets.
• Adjoining innovation. This eco-innovation consists of using what the company does well in a new space.. That is, the same improved product for a new market, or a new product for an already established market.
• Radical innovation. It includes the transformation proposals, aimed at creating new product ranges to serve new markets and the customers’ needs.

The use of this tool enables companies not only to associate to an Ecoinnovation level, but also to be able to assess overall what its global strategy is and re?ect whether it really meets the company model and pro?le that it wishes to be on the market.